In an industrial manufacturing environment, accurate control of the manufacturing process is important to increase the efficiency of the factory, e.g., decrease cycle time, increase throughput, and improve equipment utilization. Ineffective process control can lead to the manufacture of products that missed due dates, fail to meet desired yield and quality levels, and can significantly increase costs due to increased raw material usage, labor costs, and the like.
When managing a manufacturing facility, complicated decisions need to be made about what operations should be performed and the order of these operations. In order to generate a schedule for a manufacturing facility, significant amounts of data must be collected from one or more software systems in the facility. The data from the systems must be transformed and manipulated from the external system's format into a format suitable for use by the scheduling engine. Current Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) systems perform these transformations and manipulations using one or more programming languages that makes designing these operations difficult and time-consuming and requires specialized programming knowledge.